As the Semester Winds Down

The semester is almost over! After spending the past few months studying epidemiology, administration, and environmental health, I could use a little break.

Highlight of the school year? Studying disaster relief, bioterrorism, and the upcoming pandemic. What the heck does that mean?

Have you ever seen "Contagion" with Matt Damon? The movie chronicles the spread of  influenza throughout the modern world, and how the virus pretty much kills everybody, similar to what happened back in 1918, when the Spanish flu went throughout the world killing 50-100 million people.

That's what I've been studying. How to combat pandemics as well as how to prevent things like an anthrax attack.

This has been another subject we've been poring over a lot. The flu is constantly changing, morphing into more difficult to treat and deadly variants of itself. Would we be prepared as a nation to fight off another 1918? I don't know, but it sure makes for some heated class discussion boards.

In the meantime, I'll attempt to finish writing a paper on eating disorders.

Go, grad school!

I Can't Win

Yellow Head goes to punch me in my stomach, misses, and ends up hitting my elbow.

"Ouch! You're mean!"

Sorry?

Why Grad School?

"Oh, so you're in grad school? Why'd you decide to go back? What do you intend to do with that?"

I face this question on just about a daily basis.

I never thought I'd really mind answering it, until I realized that I'm just not good at answering it. Why? I don't know.

I'd guess though that it has to do with my not having the one thing that I want to do with grad school nailed down like a lot of other people in my classes might. Ask one of them, and you'll receive an answer like, "Oh, I want to manage a hospital," or "I really, really want to open my own nursing home chain."

And then you get to me.

"Well, uhhhh...I like to write. I really love personal training too."

This is what throws people off. It doesn't take much to become a personal trainer. I was slightly miffed in high school when I realized that you didn't even have to go to college to become one. Literally, ANYONE can take a weekend course/test and then go around marketing themselves as a personal trainer. The best don't do this, but it gives you an idea as to how easy it is to start (and why so much fitness science crap is out there).

And so the conversation shifts to why in the world would I continue to study, and spend all of that money when "all you want to do is train people". But I don't just want to be a personal trainer. I want to truly know my stuff. I want to give people advice that works. That's what they're paying me for.

Would it even be ethical to do otherwise? I've seen it before. A client who's easily 70 pounds overweight, and therefore already at an increased risk of heart disease, gets nutrition advice from some trainer telling him to eat a diet that's 60% fat (seriously)! He's not losing any weight, and his arteries aren't going to get any better!

When people come to me, they often realize that unless they change something soon, it's only a matter of time before something happens. And so, my goal is to help them to lose the weight as safely and efficiently as possible. Prolonging the process only puts them in danger.

After my undergrad, I realized that my understanding of nutrition wasn't near as good as it needed to be in order to help people to the best of my abilities. I not only wanted, but needed to know more about a subject that I love if I wanted to have the greatest possible impact I could on these peoples' lives.

I want to help these people. I want to help them to live better, happier, and healthier. I want to help people lose weight. I want to be qualified to give sound advice to people with eating disorders. I want to raise goats, write books, work with bariatric surgery patients, open a gym, and write blogs.

And so, I guess the best way to answer that question is, "I've got a couple of ideas."

Client Quote of the Day

Me: "Yeah, I actually used to work at a nursing home a while ago. I keep telling myself that I'm going to go back and visit my patients, but I never get around to it."

Client: "Well, ya better hurry."

 Yep. I guess they're right.

A Brief Hiatus

I spent a little bit of time away from the blogosphere as of late. And even though I've found that one of peoples' least favorite things to do is to listen to other peoples' lists of what they've been up to (and yet, despite the lack of an audience, we still love to give our lists whenever we can), I'm going to succumb to the temptation and throw out some of my best excuses for not writing.

• A solid year of barely scraping by and trying my absolute best to get paired with the science-y people in chemistry and physics class - God must've liked my prayers, because I somehow magically ended up with the two smartest students in both of these classes for lab partners. Simultaneously, God must've not liked theirs, because they all got paired with an idiot with who spent his lab hours keeping a dictionary of the foreign professor's quotable phrases. "Tak owt yur booonsin bowrnurs, evweebidy."
• Conducting an obnoxiously long study on the effects of static stretching on muscle growth during a resistance training program (sounds exciting, huh?)
• Graduating from college
• Getting married to Yellow Head (woot woot!)
• Spending an entire summer working 70 hours/week on an internship, factory job, and fixing up our first house
• Grad school - can you say super sweet nutrition/weight loss courses ahead? 
• Personal training late into the night
• Working the most amazing, awesome, stinkin' coolio, favoritest job ever as an exercise physiologist for a cardiopulmonary rehab department (yep, sometimes internships do pay off. Though if you had asked me about that this past summer you would have probably just gotten a cold stare in return)
• Starting up a website - much more work than I thought

Ahhhh. It felt good to get all of that out there. Maybe that's why people like listing off all of what they've been up to lately. It's therapeutic. 

Anyways, I'm going to try to do a little better about keeping this up now that things have gotten semi-under control. Time to go though. My post-MI patients await!